Traditionally, the investigation of restitution of function following brain damage has adopted an inductive approach involving a compilation of the behaviors, neural structures, and operational paradigms capable of demonstrating the phenomenon. However, the goal of synthesizing a comprehensive theoretical position from the ensuing data base has met with limited success and produced only a continued reliance on some variation of the concept of functional reorganization. The present proposal, however, suggests that the biologically unique notion of functional reorganization is quite undefendable on empirical grounds and that the phenomenon of recovery of function might be more profitably viewed from a different vantage point. Specifically, the position which is presently taken is that the mature nervous system, like other biological systems, is functionally quite stable and incapable of the pasticity required to enable functional reorganization as a response to physiological damage. From this, recovery of function is considered dependent uppon neurological sparing where what is recovered postoperatively reflects the survival of the neural mechanisms which underwrite the behavior preoperatively. To test this conceptualization, the present research proposal suggests four separate but related experimental procedures. All of these experiments share a similar strategy of evaluating the possibility that what is recovered postoperatively is, in fact, what was present preoperatively. More particularly, the first experiment considers the possibility that postoperative recovery is not a relearning process involving new memory engrams but rather a reactivation of preoperatively established neural mechanisms. The second and third experiments are investigations of the nature of the spared neural mechanisms. The fourth experiment tests a specific prediction concerning how preoperatively established behavior patterns are postoperatively reactivated.